OUR MULTI-MEDIA WORLD: VISCERAL VS VIRTUAL

Running from 16 February to 5 March at The North Wall Arts Centre in Summertown, Kassandra Isaacson and Peter Rhoades: Visceral vs Virtual features artistic reflections on the news media all around us, and how it changes and filters our perceptions of reality.

Kassandra Isaacson and Peter Rhoades are painters, printmakers and teachers. This exhibition of work comes from a longstanding friendship and working association.

Independently, they have been developing work which explores the effect the media can have on our perceptions of the natural world and in our daily lives.

Peter’s response is expressed through the medium of paint, an enduring visceral language that could be described as an English expressionism (above).

Kassandra uses digital collage, drawing, painting and textiles to observe and record her response (right).

Both styles had their progenitors in Weimar Germany, begging the question whether we are in a similar era of global upheaval.

Both have addressed this layering of realities, actual and virtual, using the familiar tropes of still life, life drawing and landscape.

The exhibition is widely anticipated after a previous pandemic postponement.

Both artists are well established in Oxford, Kassandra as a longstanding teacher of drawing and painting and founder member of Oxford Printmakers, and Peter as a lecturer and art tutor at Christ Church.